The murder rate is down in New York City, but up in Chicago: Interestingly enough, New York City officials are claiming credit for their success, while Chicago officials aren’t blame for their failure.
Why do ”Nigerian” e-mail scams continue to identify themselves as Nigerian, and just generally make their scams too easy not to recognize? Because, apparently, this is a successful strategy. Here is, as they say, the math.
In New York, murder suspects can no longer plan their alleged victims’ funerals Why this finally became law
Headline: ”Man Pulls Gun on Neighbor For Farting” Do we really even need the article after that?
Ten Ways to Protect Your Privacy Online: Some ideas you’ve no doubt seen before, but a few you might not have
Gee, the #1 option for improving your privacy involves paying SEO “specialists”, comes from Google (which makes it money off of search-related business), and includes no details about how this is supposed to improve your actual privacy. Golly, I wonder if that could be a scam? (Hint: yes, it is.)
As for the “fart” story: notice that the guy with the gun is being charged with a terrorism-related offense? This is exactly why all the terrorism hysteria is wrong; there is no doubt whatsoever that when the police report their statistics, this case will be counted as “successful anti-terrorism” — which will then be used as an excuse for more funding.
Incidentally, I don’t suppose that the fact that NYC is increasingly a city where only rich people can afford to actually live has anything to do with the violent crime statistics, do you? Nah, couldn’t be.
Re: Ten Ways to Protect Your Privacy Online:
#2: “change your name – stranger yet, Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has said young people might have to change their names when starting adult life to escape the shadow of their dodgy past.” Better yet, never use your real name.
#4: “set strong passwords” XKCD once ran a comic showing that we’ve been brainwashed into providing passwords that are difficult to remember but difficult to crack. A 100-word sentence would be virtually unbreakable.
#6: “don’t include dates of birth/address/mother’s maiden name”. Don’t include your SSN, either. In fact, by law, you only need to provide someone with your SSN for tax purposes.
#10: “don’t use Facebook”. None of my Facebook information is correct.
Then how does anyone find you?
I only use Facebook to contact people who are already on Facebook.
By the way, this new “slayer” law is a travesty. I live in New York, and if my wife died under suspicious circumstances, but not by my hand, I should not be denied my right to control her remains just because someone thinks I might have done it.
I’m pretty sure the legal standard is “innocent until proven charged,” Powers.
Proven charged?
The Nigerian scammers who respond to my ad on Craigslist (I’m a tutor) never say they’re from Nigeria. It’s usually England.
They often crack me up – they say something like, ‘My son will be coming down to Chicago from London…’ One even had the word “city” in angle brackets, instead of taking that out and putting in the actual name of the city.
Yep. They really don’t care, or even bother to keep track of things. I’ve even had the exact same message, from the exact same e-mail account, sent to me a week later in response to a renewed listing — and that was AFTER I sent them a mocking response saying, in effect, “this isn’t even a convincing scam”.
Here’s a tip which actually works:
Step 1: make a new e-mail account for Craigslist.
Step 2: put a paragraph at the end of your Craigslist listing(s) which says “your response to this listing must contain ‘[pick an unlikely word or random string of characters]‘ or it will be automatically discarded”
Step 3: set up a filter on that e-mail account which will automatically discard any message which does not contain your filter.
You will then see that scammers don’t even bother to read your listing before trying to scam you. Kind of scary.
“You will then see that scammers don’t even bother to read your listing before trying to scam you. Kind of scary.”
Not scary at all, as these scams are generated by a computer script, not a person… and generally from throwaway mail accounts, so the responses (like “this isn’t even a halfway-convincing scam”) don’t get read, either.
Even if only 1 in a million people are dumb enough to go for it, computers can churn out ten million attempts an hour…